Revenge, deception, intrigue—The Poor Man of Nippur has it all. In June 2017, Dr. Martin Worthington of Cambridge University and students from his Assyriology class dramatized this ancient Babylonian story and captured it on film. Lasting about 20 minutes, their film was officially launched and made accessible to the public in November 2018. The tale is set in Nippur, a city in southern Iraq, during the second millennium B.C.E. The script itself follows a 160-line poem found on a tablet at Sultantepe, Turkey, and dated to 701 B.C.E. The plot is fairly straightforward: The main character, Gimil-Ninurta, who is […]
